The Scorecard Doesn’t Matter

I have had a problem for most of my life; I can’t picture myself as mediocre. I am more often than not mediocre, I just can’t picture it.

When I was a kid playing baseball, I would stand in left field (picking my nose) and dream of how great it will be when I catch that ball just before it goes past me, stopping the home run for the other team, winning the game for us. I never did catch that ball; I never caught any ball that I can remember. I certainly didn’t save the ball game and the rest of the team never cheered me. They never were upset either; I performed just as they thought I would.

I should have been happy to stop the ball with my body and toss it into second base. I should have just enjoyed being a small part of the team and not worried about how the game turned out. I shouldn’t have worried about letting down the team, my brother (the pitcher) and mostly my dad. I suppose that I should have practiced catching and hitting the ball. I suppose I should have tried harder to like baseball, but it seemed like such a stupid game. That’s because I couldn’t play I guess.

In high school, a lot of my friends taught themselves to play the guitar. One taught herself to play the drums and went on to make a living from it. There was a musical turning point in my life, when mom asked if I wanted to learn the piano. In my mind, she should have just asked me if I wanted my name changed to Poindexter. I said no. When my buddies were playing the guitar, I would sit with the “listeners”, drinking tea and solving the problems of the world.

I did pick up a guitar every now and then, but it didn’t make beautiful music in my hands and the magic of how you could move both hands in different ways just baffled me. The same could be said for the ukulele, the harmonica and a tin flute. I knew that learning anything would take time and effort on my part, but I was pretty lazy back then.

I’m not a lot better now than I was then. I now own guitars, ukuleles, harmonicas and tin flutes, but I still don’t have the will to dedicate the necessary time and effort to learning. Perhaps in the next decade of my life it will be easier for me to focus on one thing.

Those things in life that I have managed to become proficient in, I learned one step at a time. I didn’t dream that I would ever be the best in the world; I just tried to be the best that I could be. I would do a basic step and then move on to the next logical step, and on and on until I actually impressed myself. I often stop and back off at that point. I think the reason is that there are so many things I want to do and I am starting to realize that I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to do them in.

I have done well at being a good human I think. I have friends that like me and that I like. My kids turned out to be better people than I ever was and isn’t that the way it should be. I haven’t made my wife too unhappy; there have been more smiles than frowns. Hurricane, Tornado and Tsunami have a world of possibilities ahead of them and it looks as if their parents will help them turn their dreams into reality.

The score card really doesn’t matter; it is the game that counts.